Willow Smith, 18, keeps it all the way real about her history of self-harm in a new interview with PEOPLE.
During a recent episode of her Facebook Watch show, “Red Table Talk,” with her mother, Jada Pinkett-Smith, 47, and grandmother Adrienne, 65, Willow gets extremely candid about how she used to cut her wrists as teen. Now she’s sharing her experience in effort to help others.
“I was super young, and I had a dream, but all I really wanted to do was sing and I didn’t equate that with all the business and the stress that ended up coming with it,” Willow tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story that also features Jada and Adrienne.
“I was just like, ‘Whoa, this is not the life that I want’.”
By 2012, Willow shaved her head, calling it “the perfect way to rebel.” Once she reached early teens, she was cutting herself, describing it as “a physical release of all the intangible pain that’s happening in your heart and in your mind.”
She then began reading about science and spirituality and it opened her eyes. “I was like, ‘This is pointless — my body is a temple,’ and I completely stopped. It seemed literally psychotic after a certain point because I had learned to see myself as worthy.”
Jada had no idea her daughter was self-harming herself until Willow spilled the tea on “Red Table Talk.” The actress was “shocked” but “so proud of her in that moment.”
As we previously reported, Willow also shared her views on relationships during the latest episode of RTT, admitting that she loves women and men equally, and that she could see herself in a polyamorous relationship.
“I really couldn’t see myself in a quadruple, but personally, male and female — that’s all I need,” she said.
“I love men and women equally and so I would definitely want one man, one woman,” Willow added. “I feel like I could be polyfidelitous with those two people.”
“I’m not the kind of person that is constantly looking for new sexual experiences,” she explained. “I focus a lot on the emotional connection and I feel like if I were to find two people of the different genders that I really connected with and we had a romantic and sexual connection, I don’t feel like I would feel the need to try to go find more.”
